We’re used to one story about crypto and blockchain as software that evades regulation and control - indeed, positively enabling unethical and harmful trading. At the Alternative Global, we’re trying to grapple with its possibilities for community empowerment - as systems of valuing that are different and diverse in what they value, and strengthen civic purpose.

A strong resources for this approach is Nathan Schneider (who is having dialogues with many crypto gurus, like Vitalik Buterin, and is much profiled on this site). Nathan has just written a piece for Noema magazine, which imagines that crypto and blockchain could be a new way to enforce and uphold human rights, rather than subvert them. He begins his piece with a nightmare scenario:

Imagine there is a new decentralized finance app quietly spreading around the world that’s like a payday lender from hell. Call it DevilsBridge. Rather than getting it from the App Store, you access its blockchain contracts directly, using a Web browser with a crypto-wallet plugin.

DevilsBridge provides small loans in cryptocurrency that “bridge” people to the next paycheck. The interest rates are far below those of conventional payday lenders, which is life-changing for many users.

But if the payments go unpaid, they grow. They balloon. They reach multiples upon multiples of the principal [investment]. As time goes on, pressure ratchets up on borrowers, who become notorious for undertaking desperate, violent crimes to pay back their exorbitant debts.

The deal, after all, is that if a debt reaches the magic threshold of $1 million, the debtor becomes a target. A private market of poison-dart-shooting drones receives a bounty to assassinate the mega-debtors.

Anywhere there are laws, of course, this is all wildly illegal. But nobody knows who created DevilDAO, the decentralized autonomous organization that operates DevilsBridge, or who its members are. The identities of the drone owners also hide behind cryptographic gibberish.

Sometimes local police can trace the drones back to their bases, or investigators can trace a DevilDAO member’s address to a real person. But in most places where the assassinations happen, authorities are ill-equipped for airborne chases or scrutinizing blockchain analytics.

This may sound like a cartoonish scenario, but it’s freshly plausible thanks to the advent of decentralized, autonomous systems on blockchains.

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin jokingly nodded to such dystopian possibilities in early 2014, when he listed possible uses for his proposed blockchain, from crop insurance to decentralized social networks — or perhaps, he said as he walked away from the mic, it could allow for the creation of Skynet, the robot intelligence in the “Terminator” movies that tries to exterminate the human race.

The potential for blockchain-enabled human-rights abuses is real. At the same time, these technologies introduce new ways of encoding and enforcing rights.

Imagine the blockchain that DevilsBridge runs on introduces a software update. It bans any smart contract that kills humans. An anonymous investigator presents evidence of what the app is doing, and an anonymous jury confirms its validity; instantly, the contracts for DevilsBridge and DevilDAO no longer function.

Let’s be honest: the very possibility of human-rights enforcement goes against the dominant story of what blockchains are for. Ask your average crypto-bro why crypto needs to exist in the first place, and you will likely hear about “censorship resistance” and “immutability.”

These bits of jargon mean that no gatekeeper can stop your transaction from going through, and once it has gone through, nobody can reverse it. Many crypto advocates believe that these, and these alone, are the rights that matter.

But blockchains can be better than immutability machines. They can enable new strategies for establishing and enforcing rights that, unlike the current regimes, do not rely on the assent of military-backed nation-states.

Blockchains have the potential to create a new layer of global social contracts, in which human peers, more than territorial governments, are the protagonists.

What I am suggesting is more foundational than what people usually think of when they discuss blockchain for human rights: new apps for tracking supply chains or verifying votes or protecting news reports from censorship.

Blockchains themselves could have human rights written into their basic protocols. Isaac Asimov famously outlined design “laws” that would prevent his sci-fi robots from turning on their makers. This new kind of autonomous technology should come with safeguards and fail-safes against causing harm to human life and to the planet we depend on.

Nathan fleshes this out further:

… No technology is beyond the reach of human politics. There are always ways for humans to intervene and ways that the tech constrains them. Designers cannot really choose one or the other, only decide on a balance.

To be neutral on human rights is in fact a choice not to consider human rights. Neutrality is an implied refusal, a missed opportunity, a failure of imagination.

After all, the present international order is not living up to its job. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy provided yet another reminder of this when he spoke to the United Nations Security Council on April 5: Why, he asked, should this institution even exist if it cannot halt an unprovoked invasion of his country?

Russia is hardly the first nation to commit war crimes without fear of meaningful consequences. As Vladimir Putin likes to remind us, the United States has frequently violated international law, its leaders always confident that they will never face justice. As the climate crisis continues to worsen, meanwhile, the most carbon-emitting countries are competing with each other to drag their feet hardest against their non-binding commitments.

Blockchains could fill in where the international system has failed. Their smart contracts can enforce commitments that do not depend on any national legal regime. They could de-center governments — even corporations, too — as the main actors on the global stage.

Through blockchains, agreements and their enforcement could occur without laws or lawyers, secured by participants’ joint involvement in a common network.

If my home’s mortgage is on a blockchain, attached to a pact to install solar panels alongside 100,000 other borrowers around the world, I will install those panels. (Hopefully the contract has some kind of leniency if I have trouble with a payment.)

If a government has its debt on a blockchain that bans the purchase of cluster bombs, that is a good reason not to get caught buying any. (Hopefully its weapons inspectors can be trusted.) Global networks may enable new kinds of enforcement that are unavailable to states.

He suggests some speculative designs as to what these new ethical blockchains would look like:

Imagine a new blockchain protocol, FreeBlock, that advertises itself as “guaranteed slavery-free.” The need for it arose because advocacy groups began organizing boycotts of blockchains used in underground slave trading. The blockchain foundations considered this unfair; policing bad behavior wasn’t their job.

But to play it safe, a group of app developers came together to create FreeBlock. Among its basic features is that, if a certain number of independent investigators associates an address with slave trading, it vanishes from the network. Its funds are redistributed to every other address.

Consider another fiction: FairPayDAO, a collective that maintains a token-curated registry of “FairPay Protocols.” Any DAO can apply by submitting evidence that payment to contributors is transparent and that there is a process for contesting discriminatory pay.

If an audit of the underlying code passes without objection from FairPayDAO members, the applicant’s contract address is added to the registry. Meanwhile, a growing network of DAOs commits to only doing business with FairPay-certified entities.

It’s a dazzling new world of technological and financial practice depicted here - and feels like a new norm heading towards us. We encourage you to read all of Nathan’s very important essay.

What if we didn't need states and corporations to enforce human rights and ethical standards in our trading? A blockchain proposal